In the provision of utility and telecommunications services and in other fields, small outdoor structures are often permanently installed for the purpose of housing various electronic components, such as switching, power supplies and test apparatus. These structures, commonly referred to as "cabinets" in the trade, allow service technicians to access the necessary electronic components without accessing the customer buildings served by those components. The cabinets are typically lighted and heated to maintain a desirable operating environment for the components housed in the cabinet and to provide a suitable working environment for technicians servicing these components. Thousands of such cabinets have been built and permanently installed, and many more will be built and installed in the future.
Many cabinets are of a substantial size; a common size is approximately the height of an ordinary service technician with a width equal to the height and a length somewhat longer than the width. Cabinets with a 6 feet by 8 feet footprint and a height of 6 feet are not unusual. Cabinets of this size typically have a set of double doors on one end for service access. Although these cabinets are of a substantial size, their interior is crowded with electronic components and related elements. There is generally insufficient space in the cabinet for the service technicians to place their tools and to perform their work. The service technician instead works largely from outside the cabinet. This poses several problems. Because the cabinet doors are kept open while the service work is done, the controlled environment in the cabinet interior is immediately lost and is not regained until after the work is completed and the doors are closed. This may adversely affect the performance and service of the various electronic components for which the controlled environment is designed. Further, the service technician is exposed to the weather during the time the service is performed. At a minimum, this may result in the inconvenience of working in uncomfortable temperature extremes; more serious, it may render the service impossible, or even dangerous to the technician or the equipment, due to rain, wind or other inclement weather.
One approach to this problem is to erect a temporary shelter outside the cabinet adjacent to the access doors. This approach as currently implemented in the prior art is unsatisfactory for several reasons. The temporary shelter such as a tent does not interface with the cabinet in a manner that seals out the weather. The tent or other temporary shelter may be difficult and time-consuming to erect properly, and may not be stable in the wind. These are problems of both effectiveness and safety.
The prior art describes a number of systems to erect and install tents that are convenient and stable, both in the field of recreation (such as camping), and the field of utilities (such as tents to pitch over manhole covers during service or to cover uncompleted construction projects). Some of these tents operate on the principle of flexible tent poles which define a tent wall in such a way that the poles are stably biased against a fabric sheet by driving a center "hub" through an instable intermediate position. Examples of such tents are in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,968,809, 4,285,354 and 4,637,748, assigned to the assignee of the present patent. These prior art patents do not teach a system for temporary attachment of the tent to a cabinet.